I’ve again worked with James Ashworth and other members of the Oxford Doctor Who Society in producing a new issue of its fanzine. Number 42 of The Tides of Time, published in November 2018, is now online as two PDFs:

Past and Present Mixed Up – Matthew Kilburn explains the background to his Black Archive entry on The Time Warrior

Doctors Assemble – James Ashworth explores the connections between Doctor Who and the worlds of Marvel Comics

The Fan Show – Ian Bayley reflects on Peter Capaldi’s panel at London Film and Comic Con 2018

Empty Pockets, Empty Shelves – Thoughts by Matthew Kilburn on the transition between Peter Capaldi’s Doctor’s library-like TARDIS in Twice Upon a Time and Jodie Whittaker’s empty pockets in The Woman Who Fell to Earth

Blind Drunk at Sainsbury’s – Is Big Finish’s attempt at presenting a woman Doctor in Exile a suitable precedent for Jodie Whittaker? No, says James Ashworth, but in many more words

A Stone’s Throw, Part Four. – The last part of John Salway’s tale of the fourth and fifth Doctors

This Mild Curiosity – William Shaw tells of Facebook group Time And Relative Dimensions In Shitposting

I didn’t manage to write a review of It Takes You Away, as I was busy with several other projects. I had promised John Connors a review of The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos for his Space-Time Telegraph, so my initial thoughts can be found there. I’d deliberately not looked at very many reactions, at least not detailed ones, and might add some more thoughts here in a few days’ time; but December is pressing on, with many Christmas-related commitments as well as work. So for the time being, I direct readers over to Space-Time Telegraph:

As mentioned in my last post, this week’s review was already promised to Doctor Who Reviews, and has been posted there. My look at The Witchfinders took longer to deliver than I’d hoped, thanks to my general business and the need to check some of the historical details. I could have gone further, but for pressure of time. I did take a look at Arthur Douglas’s The Fate of the Lancashire Witches, which is mentioned in the review. There’s a photograph in it of Pendle Hill above the village of Downham which might have influenced the look of the episode. Otherwise Tracy Borman’s Witches: James I and the English Witch Hunts (2013) is a good, readable, informed history aimed at a general readership without compromising its scholarship, and any biography of James VI and I should shed light on his interest in witchcraft. Details which I’d not come across at the time I completed the review were that James VI did establish standing commissions for the investigation of witchcraft in 1591, but disbanded them in 1597 as his scepticism over witchcraft increased. Perhaps the Witchcraft Act of 1604 and the subsequent references to witches in Shakespeare’s Macbeth are reflections of how his English subjects saw King James based on the image they’d built up from his Scottish career, than on his priorities as an English ruler. There are several other lines of consideration to take; every Doctor Who story is a conversation with its audience and The Witchfinders offers much to talk about. For a more succinct take than I offered, and by someone who has a background in witchcraft studies, see Matt Barber’s review for SciFi Bulletin.

Another late post, and my uppermost observations about Kerblam! concern how the debate has been formed. There is a broad age division, with most of the younger commentators thinking this episode betrayed Doctor Who‘s radical history, and older people appreciating that the old story was avoided, where the Doctor helps the oppressed achieve a revolution, but doesn’t stick around to effect the major socio-political transformation needed to cement the revolution’s gains. Instead we were treated to a clever story about small victories, where the Doctor and friends introduce trust into a situation where human beings maintain suspicion of one another, and the robots act as automated guarantors and protectors of as well as spokesbots for both system and System.

I’d mentioned absence of ‘drive’ before, but hadn’t explored what I might mean. I’m thinking in terms of force and energy in performance and in writing, present in different ways in the works of both Russell T Davies and Steven Moffat, and not present under Chris Chibnall. Instead, there is a changed quality, a stillness, reflected in Segun Akinola’s open, often melancholy music cues, in sharp contrast to the emotion-forcing chords of Murray Gold. We might argue that the decisions that the Doctor and friends make in this series of Doctor Who are much closer to those the viewers make in their lives, based on incomplete information, ingrained prejudice and the limitations effected by inexperience and urgency.

So there are two robot revolts, in effect; one entirely dictated by Charlie to those parts of the System which he has enslaved, and the other by the System itself, loyal to its original programming. The Doctor helps the desperate artificial intelligence in fulfilling its purpose and prevents its abuse to effect mass murder by someone who seems to have run rather more trial liquidations than necessary. There is no need for any system to be a problem; and while the social order on Kandoka is clearly problematic (and unreal in its extremities – does Kerblam! ship beyond Kandoka, and are other societies more prosperous than Kandoka seems to be?) the System at Kerblam! is as much a prisoner as anyone. Julie Hesmondhalgh’s Judy Maddox and Callum Dixon’s Jarva Slade are helped to liberation by a small increment, but confronting head office directly is beyond the Doctor’s reach, and the situation doesn’t offer her any leverage.

Rewatching, the performances in Kerblam! all catch the attention. Claudia Jesse’s Kira has something of the sweet and cheery-but-doomed Dickensian orphan about her; Julie Hesmondhalgh’s Judy is the enforcer who can’t hide her obvious abstract view of the world within her corporate shell; Lee Mack’s Dan suggests that it’s not a good idea to be a prominent audience-friendly character in a script directed by Jennifer Perrott, as you will get killed; while Leo Flanagan’s Charlie reminds us that murderers are people with all their warmth and quirks and sympathetic confusions (I think he deliberately offered himself to be ‘caught’ by the TeamMate when it came after him in the office, suggesting that the people in the room with him did not seem expendable, and/or that he was seeking martyrdom), and not obviously monsters. The regulars work together better, perhaps, than at any time since Rosa or indeed ever, perhaps because they were active participants here as much as they were witnesses to events. Jodie Whittaker’s Doctor is becoming more forceful while retaining and refining her childlike enthusiasms and disappointment – see how crestfallen she is when told that human beings aren’t allowed to climb on the conveyors – and Mandip Gill throws herself into a Yaz who asks more police officer questions than before and acts as a motivator for other characters, particularly Ryan. Tosin Cole, Gill and Flanagan give a tour de force of CGI environment acting in the conveyorbelt scene too.

This was then one of the most consistently enjoyable episodes of the series so far. Pete McTighe’s affection for Doctor Who shone through, the Doctor’s patronage of Kerblam! being in the tradition of obsession with aspects of consumer culture shown by other twenty-first century Doctors, with some of the wittiest dialogue heard so far in this deliberately prosaic series. I enjoyed seeing that the Doctor continues to practice Venusian Aikido after its appearance in The Ghost Monument, though will not be happy until Jodie Whittaker throws two heavies over her shoulders with a cry of ‘Hai!’

Next episode – in a couple of days’ time – I’ll be at Doctor Who Reviews by The Doctor Who News Page once more, with a historian’s view (not my period!) of The Witchfinders.

]]>https://theeventlibrary.wordpress.com/2018/11/24/doctor-who-xxxvii-11-7-kerblam/feed/1kerblam-grabmatthewkilburnBuy Me a Coffee at ko-fi.comDoctor Who XXXVII/11.6: Demons of the Punjabhttps://theeventlibrary.wordpress.com/2018/11/17/doctor-who-xxxvii-11-6-demons-of-the-punjab/
https://theeventlibrary.wordpress.com/2018/11/17/doctor-who-xxxvii-11-6-demons-of-the-punjab/#commentsSat, 17 Nov 2018 19:19:45 +0000http://theeventlibrary.wordpress.com/?p=1857Vinay Patel’s photograph of some of his Demons of the Punjab reading, as shared by him on Twitter.

I’ve not had time this week to review Demons of the Punjab in full, and it’s about to be displaced from its window by Kerblam! I hope to find time to write more about it: it battles with Rosa for being the most successful episode of the season. It was as visually impressive as Jamie Childs’s first episode as director, The Woman Who Fell to Earth, with the land being even more of a character in its own right than the cityscape of Sheffield was in the earlier season. Here, its scale is curiously small, the mountains seeming a long way away; like Rosa, I could imagine this story working as a 1960s four-parter shot at Riverside Studios if not Lime Grove. The scene of the Doctor’s machine-building echoed the sonic-forging in The Woman Who Fell to Earth and it brought back some of the drive I’ve felt was missing from the intervening episodes.

The Doctor cements her priestliness by marrying Umbreen and Prem, and though her faith is defined as personal and beyond denomination, the quasi-sacerdotal role she adopts projects a universalism without seeking to proselytise. Vinay Patel’s careful script concentrated on a wedding and family anxieties and beliefs rather than on the wider apocalyptic landscape of Partition, with the Doctor’s nonchalant remark about talking to Mountbatten expressing something of the continuing failure of British authorities and people alike to understand the consequences of decades of imperial misrule and the practicalities of dividing not just territory but people, without and within. This Doctor might, as many have it, be a ‘Doctor of Hope’, but while hope allows Umbreen to build a new life, it does not save Prem, and for now the men of violence rule.

Unsurprisingly, the story has inspired several forceful reviews which investigate aspects of the episode more deeply than I can. Iona Sharma’s “Tread softly, for you tread on your own history” brings home to this white British man how far the disempowering, disappropriating effects of the Partition of India are part of the identities of those who lived through it and their descendants, and how far Doctor Who grapples with the British imperial legacy. Paul Driscoll’s piece for What Culture is particularly good on the development of the thirteenth Doctor and especially the meaning of the Doctor’s seemingly increased religiosity in this incarnation. Strange Complex thought that the depiction of the trauma of Partition in the microcosm of a family transmitted history to an early evening Remembrance Sunday audience effectively, and liked the development of not just Yaz but also Ryan.

Elsewhere, there are comparisons with Rosa, Morgan Jeffery at Digital Spy thinking that while the story advances Chris Chibnall’s showrunning’s investigations of human nature, it’s not quite as solid in performance as its predecessor. Victoria Walker at The Tides of Time(disclaimer: I edit this site) found it more powerful and was particularly touched by the unavoidable fate of Prem. Tim Robins at Down the Tubesis greatly appreciative of the strengths of Vinay Patel’s script and where it complements Patel’s other work, but also thinks it shows up the weaknesses of the current season, particularly in the lack of space for the development of the regulars.

]]>https://theeventlibrary.wordpress.com/2018/11/17/doctor-who-xxxvii-11-6-demons-of-the-punjab/feed/1matthewkilburnVinayPatel_sourcesDoctor Who XXXVII/11.5: The Tsuranga Conundrumhttps://theeventlibrary.wordpress.com/2018/11/07/doctor-who-xxxvii-11-5-the-tsuranga-conundrum/
https://theeventlibrary.wordpress.com/2018/11/07/doctor-who-xxxvii-11-5-the-tsuranga-conundrum/#respondWed, 07 Nov 2018 00:38:27 +0000http://theeventlibrary.wordpress.com/?p=1827A few weeks ago I suggested that the placing of Doctor Who on Sunday nights confirmed it as the established national religion in the eyes of BBC One. The Tsuranga Conundrum might confirm this, with the Doctor finding herself in a society which not only knows her – the first time this has happened this series – but regards her as a priest or a saint. I’m not sure what the episode’s Book of Celebrants thinks a celebrant is, but if it’s a book for celebrants in the sense of those who can officiate at religious ceremonies or comparable rites of passage, then perhaps both the Doctor and General Eve Cicero are exemplars around whose deeds sermons can be based. The society which built the Tsuranga and Resus One presumably has a faith in which military heroes can be saints, but this doesn’t seem an excessively militarised society. The details are underdeveloped, but it’s possible to imagine the 67th century culture in which the Doctor and friends find themselves as a pluralist one where there are different ways to lead an ethical life and people share each other’s rituals. The Doctor is not the celebrant of the incantation for Eve Cicero which closes the episode, but instead that role falls to an android about to die who has been insulted in earlier dialogue. This might seem too much in the vein of 1980s/1990s Star Trek for some, but it underlines the concern of Chris Chibnall’s Doctor Who with the overcoming of social divisions and unnecessary prejudice. While once again the threat is not vanquished but set loose, in the context of the religious theme this looks less like an untied loose end than a chance at redemption. One feels Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King would have approved. Yet the Pting’s nature means that its good is to consume energy without relent or remorse; so, then whose redemption are we talking about?

Elsewhere, it looks as if Doctor Who is continuing a tour of precinct drama genres, with The Tsuranga Conundrum embedding the TARDIS friends in an episode of a hospital series. Suzanne Packer, so long a stalwart of Casualty, is a marker of this identification, but confounds the expectations being courted by playing a patient rather than a member of medical staff. General Cicero is still part of the resolution, but before then her consort’s illicit procurement of adrenalin blockers provides one of the indicators of how flawed the Tsuranga system is. The Tsuranga is understaffed and over-reliant on automation. Its systems lack adequate back-ups. Its procedures are incapable of making decisions with the necessary finesse at a distance. This must have chimed with those viewers who work in outposts of thinly-spread businesses, reliant on support services who might as well be on a different planet.

Taken together as medics and patients, the inhabitants of the Tsuranga form a staple of British postwar mythology, the plucky crew of a vessel facing gremlins in the works. Eve Cicero fills the role of the Battle of Britain hero, her brother that of the youngster or the long-overlooked colleague who finds the confidence to rise to an emergency. Chibnall’s Doctor Who looks to underlying forms of story, much as the Doctor accepts that a path to enlightenment is just that even if it involves taking up arms against a threat – guns can be someone else’s solution in the right context, perhaps one involving a significant risk of self-sacrifice.

Last week I said that Doctor Who under Chris Chibnall could feel hollow, and was taken to task. Perhaps it would be better to say that it pulls its punches in the interests of maintaining a broad coalition of viewers in divided times, after a long period of self-conscious cleverness. Perhaps this is a Doctor Who mindful that a sizeable chunk of the British audience seemed to say a couple of years ago that they had had enough of experts. Despite this, although we meet the Doctor atop a pile of space debris, instructing her hapless friends who are armed with metal detectors, the insubordination (from Graham) is mild and doesn’t directly point out that the Doctor taking charge and dictating is part of the format of the series in the way that a scene in a pre-Chibnall season might have done. Instead, it’s left to the unfolding of the episode to make the contrast, as the still-recovering Doctor attempts to take charge of a situation without having the information she really needs. The Doctor’s fallibility is positioned in such a way, though, as to ultimately emphasise her authority, but it has to be earned through the gathering and application of knowledge and management skills. When the Doctor invokes Poirot, she’s not doing so to stun the assembled with an incredible deduction expressive of her genius, but instead to urge the pooling of skills.

Otherwise… the regulars shared the action out well, with each turning up just as I was missing them; Yaz is here the Doctor’s right hand and prize pupil with the men having their own adventures in obstetrics. The Pting – a relic of a lost version of this story by Tim Price – was beautifully set up and remained a real and serious threat despite its embrace of absurdity. It also gets to live, and benefits more clearly from the relativism which shaped the fate of the spiders in Arachnids in the UK – the assumption that the Pting wants to kill people is mistaken, as it devours energy channelled through non-organic sources; organic life forms barely register in its grasp of the universe. The programme again returns to co-existence between barely compatible worldviews. As in Rosa, the process of education is a long one and not to be glibly solved in fifty minutes of television. Jennifer Perrott’s visualisation of the script worked extremely well; the series of portrait shots in heavily polarized scenes were noticeable as were the varied distances from the group in collective shots depending on the comparative integration of the ensembles.

In other words, I enjoyed it, and while I thought some characters and background could have done with a little more polish, this was involving television and revealed more about the series’ overall concerns under its new regime. Only five episodes left, however.

A review of Chris Chibnall’s two-part story for the 2010 series of Doctor Who, originally published in This Way Up.

‘Your people thrive in hot climates, and there are still large areas in the world today very similar to the conditions in which you knew the planet, and these areas hardly touched by Man. With your technology you could build cities in those parts of the world which Man has ignored.’

‘We have cities,’ said Okdel, ‘great domed cities in valleys waiting for us to return.’

‘No,’ said the Doctor. ‘This must be hard for you to understand, but there is no trace of your civilisation on this planet.’

– Malcolm Hulke, Doctor Who and the Cave-Monsters (1974), 109-110

Of all the television adventures of the Doctor to which we have been introduced since 2005, the past has weighed the most heavily on The Hungry Earth/Cold Blood. Where other stories have embraced their heritage in twentieth-century Doctor Who and danced passionately around the storytelling ballroom with varying consequences, this is the first where I have felt the tale found that its shoes were weighed down with stone. This stone might be richly-veined marble, but it needs to be cut more finely than Chris Chibnall and Ashley Way managed.

The veins are themselves a variety of pasts. Some of these are pasts within the story, which televised Doctor Who once related. Others are those which it might have done, had it been in production in the late 1990s. This was finally proved relevant in the context of the season. Other pasts are real world ones making their presence felt on screen, but which contribute to an incoherent vision rarely experienced in twenty-first century Doctor Who. The effect was to make the whole story seem unhappily old-fashioned.

Mining the past

The pre-credits sequence for The Hungry Earth establishes that this story has mined different materials but doesn’t know what to do with them. The location is part of the story’s resources. Even if the viewer didn’t know that the drillhead sequences were shot at Tower Colliery, the last deep mine in the South Wales coalfield and as the subject of a buyout by management and workers a symbol of miners’ struggle against the extinction of the industry in South Wales, the setting invites consideration of decline and population displacement. That most of the houses in the terrace where Ambrose, Mo and Elliot lived seemed to be boarded up underlined this, though it also suggested that the drilling operation was remarkably understaffed. Indeed, no other engineers, mechanics or administrators were seen on site – even automation needs supervision, particularly on a high risk project such as the one we are shown here. One could extrapolate a point about the displacement of humans by machines as an analogue for the replacement of the reptile people by primates, but there was no indication that this was intended.

It was pointed out to me that Cwmtaff is practically a direct reference to Taff Vale, scene of a particularly bitter industrial dispute which in 1901 led to a trade union with the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants being sued by the Taff Vale Railway Company for damages as a result of losses incurred during a strike. Despite their name, which appears deferential to twenty-first century eyes, the ASRS led an effective sabotage campaign which prevented the replacement employees from operating the railway. The court’s judgement in favour of the company inspired a reaction which contributed to the formation of the Labour Party and the Trade Disputes Act of 1906 which protected unions against actions for recovery of lost income. There’s a rough parallel here between the reptile people and the railwaymen, with Nasreen and her team being the employers whose equipment is sabotaged. It’s difficult to believe that this wasn’t intentional, but it doesn’t seem to lead anywhere; and when a story is told with the intensity this story attempts, it’s difficult to get away with an undirected allusion.

In terms of homages to old Doctor Who stories, The Hungry Earth/Cold Blood is particularly rich. The Welsh mining context immediately recalls The Green Death, but Nasreen’s project refers the memory on to Inferno. Tony Mac’s infection and mutation recall both stories, but the underplaying diverts the long-term viewer from musing on parallels with mid-1970s tales of possession. Mo and Amy’s being sucked underground is borrowed directly from Frontios; and in the churchyard we learn that while the parishioners of Cwmtaff bury their dead, Chibnall’s village emulates Bidmead’s end-of-the-universe world and would do it for them by a seemingly inexplicable process. The heat shield was surely borrowed by the reptile people from Azal of The Daemons on one of his early visits to Earth. The reptile technology has a scaliness which echoes their physical appearance; given their tendency to keep human beings in suspended animation, in cubicles, they might almost as well be in an organic spacecraft under Loch Ness. The establishment of Nasreen as a temporary companion to the Doctor while the other regulars had their own stories was a device most associated with the Davison era, Nasreen becoming the heir of Todd in Kinda or Jane Hampden in The Awakening.

The noblest Silurian of them all?

If this story appeals to Doctor Who’s past by taking elements from earlier adventures and treating them as symbols of Doctor Who-ness, taking them for granted as established mythic totems, then it also draws from other heroic cycles. Most remotely, any civilization of warriors under a hill in Wales could be construed as Arthurian, and the Doctor specifically asks Mo and Elliot to pass on the story of the reptile civilization. The cross-current here is the naming of the principal human warrior as Ambrose. This is the name of a late Roman saint who was once a soldier, hideously inappropriate but apposite for the murder in the church. Ambrose also recalls Ambrosius Aurelianus, the last of the Romans in Gildas’s On the Ruin and Conquest of Britain, defender of post-Roman Britain against the Saxon invader, and by the twelfth century transformed into Aurelius Ambrosius in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain, uncle of King Arthur and interred under Stonehenge, which will resound in Doctor Who in The Pandorica Opens. It’s peculiar that the name – Emrys in Welsh – is masculine. I’ve never come across a woman called Ambrose before. Perhaps this could be read as a form of coding, but it’s not clear why. Mo is familiar as an abbreviation for Marjorie or Maureen, so it could be evidence of a transposition of genders in scripting stage, but Mo also connotes the early mediaeval name of central south Wales, Morgannwg, the land of Morgan, whether the semi-legendary eighth century king Morgan or his tenth-century namesake. Elliot brings us into the recent past, as his name is that of the hero of E.T.; take away one ‘l’ and he is the namesake of the author of The Waste Land, a poem of love and war and loss beyond imagination. All these names recall oppositions between alien and visitor, and in many issues of home and where home is located in a physical and an imagined sense. Even the family name, ‘Northover’, echoes the Old North of Welsh legend, whose warriors fell at the battle of Catraeth in the poem Y Gododdin.

It’s well into The Hungry Earth that the Doctor mentions the word ‘Silurians’, and no-one comments that this means they are local, as the Silures was the name by which the Romans knew the people of South Wales. (There is even a Silurian Place not far from the latterday Torchwood tourist trail in Cardiff Bay.) In this context it’s perhaps noteworthy that the Doctor persists in referring to Silurians as ‘tribes’, a term which tends to be used of peoples with a low level of political organization. In the eyes of the Romans this would certainly apply to the non-urbanized Silures. In the words of the Roman historian Tacitus, the Silures were ‘a naturally fierce people and now full of confidence in the might of Caractacus’. (Annales, ed. A.J. Church and W.J. Brodribb, 12.33). Chibnall may have taken the second and third syllables of the first century British leader for his reptilian warrior, though there is a more technical reason for the name too as discussed below.

Again pointing forward to The Pandorica Opens, there is some symbolic power in Rory’s death from Restac’s gun blast under the soil of South Wales. Not only does Restac’s gun echo the destructive power of the drilling operation, just as the reptile people’s tunnels bring reminders of coal seams, but the crack in time is also a fissure in the bedrock in the land where Doctor Who is made. Rory’s fate is analogous to Jack’s in the Torchwood episode Exit Wounds, where Jack is buried under the site of Cardiff and so becomes a votive sacrifice in anticipation of the settlement’s foundation. If Rory was not already clearly part of the foundations upon which this series of Doctor Who is based, then at his death he becomes so almost literally.

Negotiating opposites

The Hungry Earth/Cold Blood appears then to set up a mythological system based on analogies between humans and reptile people as invaders and natives, workers and corporate bosses. These ideas circulate against each other and alongside each other, intermingling so that the two types of vein become intermeshed at capilliary level. If the intention was to show to the audience that both peoples had valid rights to the planet, both being depicted as predators and victims, then the message was confused by unbalanced presentation of the two societies. The reptile people are the subjects of hierarchy, with the highest representative of their government on hand and their conduct governed by formal structural relations. Human beings are more freewheeling, with relationships built across social and business rank and their decisions characterised as more autonomous from the mass. While the actions of both are depicted as shaped by injuries to family, the reptile people speak in terms of gene pools, as if this is a notion from which they are detached. Humanity’s leadership is spontaneous, with Rory emerging as the interlocutor with Restac without formalities, and Nasreen and Amy being able to represent humanity in negotiations with the reptile leadership over the fate of the planet simply by being the human beings present.

Whatever the high intentions of the negotiation scene, the effect was ludicrous. The imbalance between Eldrane’s authority and that of Nasreen and Amy was too obvious; an agreement between the parties would have carried little credibility with either of their constituencies. If one objects that Doctor Who, particularly since 2005, has rested entire storylines on greater unlikelihoods, the problem with The Hungry Earth/Cold Blood is that it had already established its appeal to a much starker sense of emotional reality with the murder of Alaya. This might be the fairytale season, and the negotiation scene is a fairytale one, but the murder is too straightforward to be a fairytale death. Thus uncertainty of tone undermines what strengths the story has. The design inconsistencies between the organic appearance of the reptile people’s underground city at the end of The Hungry Earth, and the art deco look of their central building, contributes towards the sense of disharmony of vision, when the story needs the opposite at this point.

The Hungry Earth drew some of those strengths from its exploitation of a mythic Doctor Who: people being dragged unawares into holes in the ground, contact with a non-human organism leading to transformation, the known – in this case a rationally-developed scientific project – being displaced by the uncanny. The latter is not too dissimilar from the discovery of the TARDIS in the junkyard in An Unearthly Child. This would seem to be a standard binary arrangement of the mythic model developed by Claude Lévi-Strauss (and everything I know about that, I learned from Matt Hills’s chapter in The Mythological Dimensions of Doctor Who, which is worth reading).

Unfortunately the mythic elements from past stories are treated too reverentially, and this delivers the killing blow to the negotiation scene. Retreading the steps of the 1970 story becomes more important than developing the emotional impact of the interaction between humans and reptile people, and so the scene – and much of the episode – lacks the impact that it should have. The idea that the reptile people could live in the Sahara or Arizona is straight out of Doctor Who and the Silurians, but is steeped in an outdated western European ignorance of human settlement there, as well, perhaps, as a materialist, industry-led view of the progress of human society left over from Malcolm Hulke’s Marxist background. The lines about new sources of energy and new technology offered by Eldane to Nasreen and Amy are reminiscent of those originally given by Malcolm Hulke to the Doctor after he saw the destruction of the cave system from the road at the end of episode seven of the first Silurian story, determinedly struck out by Barry Letts and replaced with a line which appreciated the Silurians as lives rather than as assets. The potential reintroduction of the Silurians to the surface thus becomes unhappily transactional.

Perhaps, then, one of the central problems this story has is that it’s difficult to extract emotional drama from vast numbers – as Planet of the Dead last year found – without some kind of image to represent them. These could be the distorting continents on the map of Earth in The Parting of the Ways, or the burning Gallifrey in the sky in The End of Time. A Doctor Who reshaped by Russell T Davies to take proper account of ‘jobs and mortgages’ needs such devices to bring the global into the domestic. Steven Moffat was a principal external consultant to this project. It’s one area where Warriors of the Deep achieves more than this story, as the inhabitants and invaders of Sea Base Four are picked off one by one, whichever species they belong to. Instead, the first Silurian story is treated as heritage without being understood or a story being told with it; the binary opposition of human and non-human isn’t satisfactorily resolved in this scene, and division is enshrined rather than overcome, which doesn’t seem to be the way this scene wants to be read. It’s left until the rising of the warriors and the forced return to suspended animation that there is as satisfactory a resolution as there can be, and that is a resolution deferred. Realistically, there can’t be ‘another way’ without taking the contemporary Earth of Doctor Who even further away from the contemporary Earth of the viewer than it already has – and the effect of the cracks in time and the rebooting of the universe in The Big Bang might indicate that the thrust of the Moffat era is to bring the two closer together again.

Transgeneric Chibnall: mechanic at work?

Chris Chibnall has written across genres, from dark contemporary relationship dramas for the stage, through Sunday evening period family domesticity, through contemporary fantasy to legal procedural television in Law and Order: UK, and now back to fantasy with the forthcoming Camelot. The heritage of many of these is seen in The Hungry Earth/Cold Blood, with the Northover family being used as the hook of the story, focus being placed on Elliot’s dyslexia and his profoundly visual imagination (of which in the end less was made than might have been expected). The governmental structure of the reptile people, with its wise old leader surrounded by a restive warrior caste, is reminiscent of the later part of the Arthurian cycle. Perhaps the negotiation scene which I’ve reviled is best understood as a kind of plea-bargaining where unpleasant compromises are made which might be unpalatable for the outside world.

Chibnall’s understanding of contemporary television fantasy, though, seems on the strength of Cold Blood to be divorced from what Doctor Who and indeed Torchwood have shown us, and is curiously old-fashioned. The reptile people, with their hierarchical civilization and their latex scales on recognizably human features, together with their robes and uniforms, seem derived from the generic aliens who popped up in 1990s Star Trek. A borrowing with more potential is the fate of Tony Mack; there is a possibility that he could become a reptile man of mammal lineage, as Valen in Babylon 5 was a Minbari not born of Minbar, though the hybrid as symbol of reconciliation was corny when it was offered as a solution as far back as V – The Final Battle, and had mixed results when it was the basis of mediaeval dynastic diplomacy.

Chibnall was once described to me as a ‘ghost showrunner’: this observation arose from a conference panel where authorship of Torchwood as a series was ascribed to Russell T Davies even though Chibnall was the day-to-day showrunner for both series one and two. It’s a mark of Chibnall’s branch of professionalism that it’s very difficult to distinguish a Chibnall signature. Most of what he has put on television has seemed to be a following of other, more easily recognisable styles. Thus it’s not surprising that this two-parter oscillates between different genres. Lots of Doctor Who does this, but The Hungry Earth/Cold Blood doesn’t do so very well, partly because it is played so straight and so shows up the inconsistencies in characterization.

Looking at the characters as they appear on screen, one ends up wondering whether too many of the mechanics of production are showing. Restac’s name is an anagram of ‘recast’, indicating that the basic concept of the character is that she can be played by the same actress as Alaya. Malohkeh’s about turn, from someone whose scientific curiosity allows him to dissect conscious beings and keep captured specimens in suspended or slowed animation to a caring lover of the natural world and opponent of force, suggests that he might be an amalgamation of two characters. To use the terminology of Doctor Who and the Silurians, these might have been an Old Silurian Scientist and a Young Silurian Scientist, though perhaps with the roles reversed, with the younger scientist being more willing to treat human beings as equals and not laboratory animals than their senior colleague. As it is, and as many reviewers have said, Malohkeh begins as a Mengele, but turns into a cuddly toy without this shift’s impact being seen to have an effect on himself or anyone else.

I’ve avoided referring to the reptile people as Silurians for as much of the article as I can manage. I am not going to entertain Eocenes either, or less still homo reptilia – I’ve had a chorus of linguists pointing out to me how bad that is as Latin. Malcolm Hulke might have coined it, but he should have known better. It’s perhaps rather precious of me to express such reservations, but over the weeks I’ve moved from being a defender of the emphasis on the human features of the actor beneath the mask, to a critic of the overall design. I’m less bothered about the human mouth or the eyes – though the mooted contact lenses would have been appreciated – but the disappearance of the third eye, a feature inspired by the parietal eye on the head of some reptiles, is regrettable and deprives these reptile people of something arresting and enigmatic. There is a precedent, of course, in the Sea Devils, but a successful reinterpretation of the original Silurian costume still eludes designers.

As for the regulars…

At this point in the season I liked most of Matt Smith’s performance while still having difficulty establishing how the character of the Doctor was now being written. This seems to have been part of Steven Moffat’s strategy for the eleventh Doctor, who by the end of the season is established as a mercurial, contrary character whose mental processes are more shrouded than his two predecessors. The eleventh Doctor seems to be more of a work in progress here. Watching Cold Blood, a friend with whom I was watching remarked ‘Now he’s channelling Davison,’ and there was indeed a lot of Davisonesque vulnerability early in the second episode, where the script threw in the intriguing notion that there is something in the Doctor’s microbiology which, if removed, would render it impossible for him to live among humans. Trends carried over from earlier episodes this season included the Doctor’s sense of his age being disassociated from his physical appearance; whereas for all their assertions of being nine hundred years and over, the Eccleston and Tennant Doctors seemed well-adjusted to their physical age, the Smith Doctor isn’t – he thinks in The Vampires of Venice that he can pose as Amy’s father, and in The Hungry Earth he tells Tony Mack, the veteran of a career of drilling projects, that he’s a ‘good lad’. There’s that curious Norman Wisdom-with-authority quality, a childlikeness which leads him to overestimate Elliot’s ability to avoid trouble. This at least is well-written. More awkward is the Doctor’s ‘fab’ flippancy during the negotiation scene, which Smith doesn’t pull off largely because of problems with the scene itself. The ‘squeaky bum time’ lines as the decontamination programme starts don’t work even if one does think the Doctor can be scatologically crude, which doesn’t seem in character.

The character who does come together in this story, which is just as well, is Rory. Looking back at The Vampires of Venice and Amy’s Choice, a lot of what I’d read as inconsistent writing and performance was more probably deliberate. Rory’s reactions to the situations in which he finds himself vary in competence and confidence because he hasn’t had the Doctor’s experience or the focus on the Doctor that Amy has (or Donna, Martha and Rose have had before her). The uncertainty in the earlier stories (particularly Vampires) rose from wider tonal variations and switching between using Rory as a viewer identification figure, occasional voice of a socially consensual outlook on maturity, and as light relief. Here, he’s much more integrated, reasonably confident in the position of establishment problem-solver imposed upon him by Ambrose, and accepting that he has skills and indeed power from his training and career as a nurse. It’s entirely right that he takes Restac’s blast for the Doctor, and Amy’s distress is believable. The entire story moves up to top gear, where it has never been, once Rory is dead and the crack in time is absorbing his body. Amy’s fight to remember him is our fight and the TARDIS’s fight, as its journey back to the surface of Earth becomes a struggle to protect memory and causality. The cracks in time remove people and memories of people, but not the consequences of their actions, which are left without an explanation, like the solitary engagement ring on which the camera lingers at the end of The Lodger, a symbol of loss and of promise.

Where, then, does this story leave Miss Pond? Both Karen Gillan and Amy are at their best when Amy is being composed and resourceful, or when Amy’s distress is being written in a subtle way. Her cry of ‘I dressed for Rio!’ when Malohkeh is making his preliminary assessment before subjecting her to his scalpel comes across as that of a spoiled child rather than a person in distress, though Karen Gillan is probably doing her best with a bad line. (Some viewers have commented that her ‘Rio’ outfit wasn’t sufficiently different from her previous costumes for the references to make sense, perhaps a further indication of a lack of an integrated creative vision for the programme.) Karen and Amy are at their best when Amy is in a situation where she can respond with some emotional reality. Here the script drops the ball, though the missing scene which resurfaced on Doctor Who Confidential where the Doctor and Amy discuss Rory and what he means to her (though she belittles him) was much, much more successfully nuanced, as were the exchanges between the Doctor and Amy as she was dragged underground. There are other points where Amy comes over as very dependent, self-consciously making barbs about clinginess; this is all very well as a character point (and it’s been observed that Steven Moffat’s characters have a tendency towards defensiveness) but it can make Amy difficult to like when her reactions seem spooned in and at odds with the other characters who are on their own emotional plot arcs.

Conclusion

The Hungry Earth/Cold Blood is largely successful as a series of technical exercises. Humanity is represented by a small group of characters who combine a limited but strong range of dynamics. The non-humans are painted with materials familiar to audiences and so suitable for relaxing early evening adventure television. There are an array of allusions for those who like playing the ‘guess-the-reference’ game to spot. There is peril for the regulars and a half-pace or so of character and arc development, as required at this point in the series. Yet – with the exception of Rory’s death scene and Amy’s struggle first to reclaim his body and then to retain her memories – the episodes had little emotional warmth. Nothing was done with Elliot’s dyslexia, which seemed flagged up as a source of a potential unexpected resolution. Indeed, resolution was deferred, which might have been brave in the right hands but instead was unsatisfying. Nasreen and Tony will represent the reptile people to a humanity they do not know, a thousand years in the future. The question of Ambrose’s redemption was left ambiguous; the sacrifice of Nasreen and Tony has in part saved her, but she must also take the slow path herself, which could have been more clearly drawn.

The great failing, though, was that there was something too flat in the execution of the whole. The staging was often too theatrical for a tale which aspired to be epic. The veins of myth and history which provided rich material had been fractured by the process of continental drift, which made mining difficult; and the production could not refine what it was able to extract sufficiently well to light up this adventure.

Thematically, I suspect that this series of Doctor Who is going to be largely of one piece. By this, I mean that I’d suggest that it is more concerned with stating the personality of the series than it is with developing individual episodes. It’s perhaps most similar to Russell T Davies’s first series in that regard, although there was a noticeable amount of tonal variation there too, especially the contrast between the feet-finding and freewheeling Aliens of London/World War Three and the more assured and claustrophobic Dalek. Arachnids in the UK had a lot in common with both those series one episodes. There was some comedic running away from spiders, especially from Graham and Ryan, which reminded me of the Scooby-Dooish fleeing from Slitheen in World War Three. Jack Robertson is a Henry Van Statten for our times, not content to influence from the shadows, but determined to be seen as the ruler of (part of) humanity, just as prone to enjoy demonstrations of his power over individuals, and just as vulnerable. Against this obsession with dictating from the top of the tree stands the Doctor, leading on the ground by discussion and evidence-gathering and seeking inclusivity and the most humane resolution rather than the most expedient. Yet there might be a hint that in its contemporary episodes especially, Doctor Who is not certain that the Doctor’s methodology is sympathetic to the programme’s current environment. In that regard it looks more towards the era of Doctor Who script-edited by Eric Saward between 1982 and 1986, when the arms of mercenaries and rebels offered solutions and even the Doctor accepted the necessity of facing down Cybermen and Davros with guns.

The Doctor is foregrounded a little more than she was in either The Ghost Monument or Rosa. Where those stories emphasised more the immediate reactions of the Doctor’s new friends to their changed situations, here they are more reflective as they adjust to how much they have changed in the days or weeks since they left Rahul’s workshop in ‘that warehouse’ (as Graham puts it), and how only half an hour has passed for everyone else. It’s Yaz who really has the everyone else, in her noisy and fractious but warm family, and they provide a good contrast for the Doctor to show her lack of social skills, her dependence on other people (‘Yaz’s for tea!’ … ‘Want company?’) and desire to find a problem she can solve. If there’s no-one seeking her help for her not to refuse, she will go and find them and inflict herself upon the crisis. Jade McIntyre seeking a missing colleague along the gallery might be a coincidence, but it’s a police procedural sort of coincidence, as there has always to be something going on in the precinct. Where Aliens of London juxtaposed the domestic with the cosmic (and who among long-term viewers must have wondered whether the Doctor’s half-hour was really going to turn out to be a year, as in 2005), the threat here is very terrestrial, although the Doctor’s interest escalates the scale: a missing parcel added to a missing person becomes a mysterious death followed by the revelation of a giant spider wanting to keep a larder going. The Doctor then becomes an improviser and problem-solver again, mixing up a spider repellent from kitchen ingredients. She later demonstrates ruthless project management skills with very selective listening and relying on Yaz to shut up Najia who is focused on protecting her reputation and establishing how her daughter knows these new friends – particularly the strange woman who talks nonsense about Ed Sheeran and later begins to detail her breakfast preferences.

Chris Chibnall’s two-parter in Matt Smith’s first season, The Hungry Earth/Cold Blood, felt very much like a tribute to Malcolm Hulke’s Silurian and Sea Devil stories from Jon Pertwee’s time as the Doctor in the early 1970s. Chibnall will almost certainly first have encountered those stories as books rather than as television. Another story written up for the novelization series by Malcolm Hulke, but not originally from his typewriter, was The Green Death, and Arachnids in the UK owes a lot to it and to another Robert Sloman serial for Pertwee’s Doctor, Planet of the Spiders. Where late period Russell T Davies and Steven Moffat would almost certainly have nodded at the earlier stories, perhaps by making Robertson the owner of the intellectual property rights of Global Chemicals, adapting them to attempt to degrade his landfill more quickly, with little success, or having the Doctor teleport the spiders to Metebelis III at the end, Chibnall’s desire for a minimal backstory means we don’t have either. Shared with The Hungry Earth/Cold Blood, as The Woman Who Fell to Earth, is an awareness of Britain’s industrial past, although where with The Woman Who Fell to Earth Sheffield’s technological skills were very much alive, here there is more of a contrast between the hi-tech genetic engineering and the abandoned mineworkings where the spiders lurk amidst the rubbish. In a sense Anna’s death is a form of poetic justice, though in contrast little blame accrues to Jade, who is required as a walking information resource.

Jack Robertson becomes the latest villain to walk or be teleported away from a crisis of their making. Chris Chibnall’s version of the Doctor seems to deal in limited solutions which might have greater consequential than immediate impact. Several have questioned whether the Doctor’s solutions to the spider problem, to let them grow and then die in the panic room, or let the mother spider suffocate under her own body weight, were of the ethical or compassionate standards they expect from the Doctor. The Doctor is not perfect; she abhors guns and her actions were rationalised as the maximum level of intervention while still allowing nature to take its course within controlled conditions, but there is no satisfactory answer, and I’m not sure whether this is part of an ongoing critique or flawed plotting.

I’m sure connoisseurs of horror films featuring overgrown animals have more to say on this episode’s cinematic roots (or perhaps other means of distribution than theatrical release are more relevant to the genre), and there’s more to say on the regular ensemble’s relationships, the attention to detail throughout (particularly what people in a scene but not central to it should do, such as Ryan’s hand shadow puppetry in Jade’s lab), or why this version of Doctor Who, while technically accomplished and highly enjoyable, feels a little hollow, though some of the reasons are apparent above. The final scene, though, is a rousing pledge of co-operation (following a quiet ‘She’s Leaving Home’ moment for Yaz, off to meet a woman in the time machine trade) and I look forward to further variety of settings and seeing how the series’ identify evolves.

Oh – and was this the first Doctor Who story that had a credited scientific adviser – Dr Niall Doran as remote successor to another environmentalist, Dr Kit Pedler? I’ve not looked it up.

]]>https://theeventlibrary.wordpress.com/2018/10/31/doctor-who-xxxvii-11-4-arachnids-in-the-uk/feed/2matthewkilburnArachnids_landfillThe Black Archive 24: The Time Warriorhttps://theeventlibrary.wordpress.com/2018/10/27/the-black-archive-24-the-time-warrior/
https://theeventlibrary.wordpress.com/2018/10/27/the-black-archive-24-the-time-warrior/#commentsSat, 27 Oct 2018 11:03:38 +0000http://theeventlibrary.wordpress.com/?p=1810The Black Archive 24: The Time Warrior was published in October 2018, and can be ordered here.

In The Invasion of Time the Doctor said that the Sontarans bred at a rate of a million per minute. This book in the Black Archive series published by Obverse Books considers the first Sontaran story, but it took rather longer to write – possibly as long as twenty-six years, if one counts from the first moment the idea was suggested. There will be more details on the development of the book in an article to appear in the next edition of The Tides of Time, from the Oxford Doctor Who Society.

]]>https://theeventlibrary.wordpress.com/2018/10/27/the-black-archive-24-the-time-warrior/feed/2matthewkilburnBA024_TIMEWARRIOR_front (1)The World of Doctor Whohttps://theeventlibrary.wordpress.com/2018/10/26/the-world-of-doctor-who/
https://theeventlibrary.wordpress.com/2018/10/26/the-world-of-doctor-who/#respondFri, 26 Oct 2018 22:50:28 +0000http://theeventlibrary.wordpress.com/?p=1806This August saw the publication of Doctor Who Magazine Special Edition number 50, The World of Doctor Who, published by Panini UK. This was the first special to be features-edited by Emily Cook, more usually credited as Doctor Who Magazine‘s editorial assistant, and she did an excellent job of gathering in a range of material to cover as many as possible of the vast variety of Doctor Who fan activities.

I was asked to write a piece on fanzines. Students of this site will have seen that at one point it ran several reviews of old fan titles, and I had also contributed earlier this year to the Facebook group The Doctor Who Fanzine Database; this commission from Emily was impossible to turn down. I joined the Doctor Who Appreciation Society (DWAS) back in 1983, when a large proportion of its pages were given over to fanzine advertisements. Even in these days of big commercial conventions, cosplay, podcasting, memes, Twitter and Tumblr, I still think of Doctor Who fandom as essentially something to do with writing.

The article’s composition was helped by a number of people who provided copious amounts of reflection and insight, very little of which I was able to use in the article. Among these was Paul F Cockburn, whom I remembered as a fan illustrator and writer in the 1980s, and who was able to provide context I hitherto hadn’t appreciated for the development of his Yeti character, whom I knew was seen in a number of Doctor Who titles, but I now learned could also be found in Edinburgh community publications of the time. Sadly Paul’s contribution had to be cut, though he turns up elsewhere in the magazine.

Other people who were extremely helpful included Tim Robins, one of the pioneers of critical writing in Doctor Who fanzines and who was very aware of various interpretations cultural studies scholars have tried to impose on the fanzine as a form, not always in a way which adequately represents the experience of the fanzine editor, contributor or reader (and many involved were hybrids of two if not three of these). John Connors made his first contribution to a fanzine in 1973 – a drawing of a Sensorite – and kept the Doctor Who fanzine going into the twenty-first century, latterly with Plaything of Sutekh (co-edited with Richard Farrell). John’s zeal for fandom and fanzines is legendary and I’m glad he was able to provide some reminiscences including the dissociative effect of participating in fandom in the 1980s, when bizarre episodes at fan meetings inspired several of John’s articles for Shada (a long-running fanzine of the 1980s mostly edited by Gary Russell, much later Doctor Who‘s script editor). Colin Brockhurst was another colossal help, and is another who keeps fanzine editing going with Vworp Vworp!

The article concentrated on the British side of fanzines partly because that’s what I knew most about, but also because it made the article more manageable. Nevertheless Steve Hill was able to put me in touch with some American creators who were able to give me their views on the role of the fanzine in American fan culture – Jan Fennick, Jennifer Adams Kelley and Nick Seidler. As correspondent Charles Mento observed on the letters page of Doctor Who Magazine 530, the subject of fiction zines, perhaps the dominant strand in North American fandom, could fill a magazine in itself, let alone an article. The criticism-led fanzine familiar to British readers was far less prevalent in North America, a point particularly clear to Graeme Burk in Canada whose stewardship of the Doctor Who Information Network’s Enlightenment (1984-2014, edited by Graeme 2000-2010) sought to redress the balance. As for New Zealand, Doctor Who fandom has much to be grateful to Paul Scoones for, including Time Space Visualiser, which I only had space to mention. Sarah Groenewegen wrote a reflection on her fanzine career for me, where again I could only use a little, from her teenage years as editor of Union of Traken – and the guidelines which the Doctor Who production office provided in the mid-1980s to fanzine editors – and then editing (with Kate Orman) the avowedly feminist title Bog Off! in her twenties.

There were avenues I’d have liked to explore more, too – several familiar names from today’s professional Doctor Who world can be found contributing to ‘Tavzines’ in the 1990s and early 2000s, fanzines distributed through the monthly London gatherings of Doctor Who fandom at the Fitzroy Tavern, and I didn’t mention this phenomenon or the strength of other local zines. There’s a direct line from several fanzines to professional writing careers and subjects which were once the preserve of fan publications now fill the pages – paper and on the computer screen – of the mainstream press as well as the burgeoning online equivalent.

Doctor Who Magazine Special Edition 50: The World of Doctor Who has been on sale for over two months but at the time of writing can still be found at some large newsagents in the UK, price £5.99.